I grew up with turkey meatloaf. You probably grew up with some version of a loaf of meat. 9-28: Stuffed Meatloaf doesn’t stray too far from the traditional mold.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too thrilled if the planned dinner for a party was a meatloaf. Don’t get me wrong, I’d appreciate the gesture. However, it’s tough to get excited about…meatloaf.

As I said in the intro, I grew up with turkey meatloaf. My mom would cover the top with barbecue sauce, cheese, and maybe some turkey bacon, and hers would usually be more of a Bundt or ring shape. I have no idea why, probably so it’d cook faster and everyone got more of the outside crusty part.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure she never made this one.

Ingredients. I used breadcrumbs instead of the potatoes, and went with the whole wheat panko, since that’s what I had open. That sad looking apple in the front was probably a bit past its time, but it works well in this kind of capacity. Used dried parsley instead of fresh, since that’s what I had.

That’s a fine looking rectangle of meat, if I do say so myself. Here’s a change I would have made: put plastic wrap UNDER this meat but on top of the board. When you go to roll it up, use the wrap and it’ll be WAY easier.

Sous chef man working on the rest of his dicing prep work.

This stuff all goes together to become the stuffing for the loaf. The card suggests swapping things out if there’s other things you like more–here’s where you’d do it.

Stuffing is evenly distributed on the meat rectangle.

This took WAY more effort than it should have to roll up–it looks solid, but the meat layer on the outside is VERY thin. It cracks/separates really easily. Part of this however, is that we had way more stuffing than it called for–my sous chef went on a bacon dicing spree and included more than was listed.

I made the last minute call to put the loaf on top of a drain/broiler pan to allow the fat to drip down. While this lent itself to a less fatty loaf, it was also a lot drier due to this technique.

Loaf after it was done. There were some structural breaches at the top, but for the most part it stayed together well. There was a LOT of fat/grease at the bottom, but that might have been because of the extra bacon in there as well.

Final cross-section shot. It was tasty, but kind of dry. That was probably my fault, but it wasn’t a huge deal. With a bit of barbecue sauce, it turned out to be a pretty good loaf. 😉